


Chivalry's Death (2P Prussia/Reader)

by e_n_silvermane



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 2P Hetalia, 2P Prussia (Hetalia), Gilen is my absolute favorite, Other, anyways this was something my brain just spat out, battle! slight gore, best writing i've done on a saturday in a while, did research on the teutonic order and everything, honestly i love it, it's good. u should read it :), more angst than anything really, probably cuz i'm sleep deprived lol, so silent. lov him, thank you for all your time reading these tags hahaha, tried to make it accurate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 07:28:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30018264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/e_n_silvermane/pseuds/e_n_silvermane
Summary: (Y/N) meets a strange man at a bus stop and decides to ask where he's from. He does not speak - but his eyes tell tales of a thousand years. A thousand years that have not let him sleep since.
Relationships: 2p!Prussia/Reader
Kudos: 2





	Chivalry's Death (2P Prussia/Reader)

**Author's Note:**

> For the description of the battle, I got my info from this page: https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Grunwald-1410   
> Very cool stuff. You should look into it, if you're interested! It's a pretty short article on an interesting subject :)  
> Anyways! Enjoy the story, and don't mind the poetic writing style too much. I've been feelin' it lately. Just my kinda jive. Hope you like it as much as I loved writing it!

Every now and again you will come across someone who has a unique story to tell. The man in the rain with an unopened umbrella. The woman on the corner with a bouquet of fresh herbs. The homeless person sleeping next to an empty violin case at subway platform 8. The schoolchild kicking cans so hard that they skitter, skitter fifty feet far. The gentleman hustling to work with two briefcases and a cup of coffee with liquor. The teenager in his mother’s blue beat-up car looking for a way to catch that beautiful girl’s eye.

This is the crawl of life. It happens this way all the time. Fights. Love. Hate. Ignorance. Bliss. Torment. Happiness. Contentedness. Impatience. Boredom. Passion. Confinement. Wonder. Destruction. Freedom. Fear. Faith.

This was how he explained it to himself; the ease with which the world was able to go on without him. It had to be. The way life was, it was just one big circle. One big reamed clock, a-ticking, a-ticking, a-ticking. Time is up, time is restarted. Time goes on and takes with it only a few. A man who was once king knows this fall from grace like no other. And the woman who sits beside him has yet to ask him why.

“Hello,” said the woman, (Y/N), who was feeling incredibly awkward sitting at this one particular bus stop on this one particular afternoon next to this one particular man who looked so particularly grey.

He turned to her with shockingly red eyes - not as if he’d been crying, or on some sort of drug, but red eyes, like red dianthus, like rubies in the night. His irises glowed with a solemn warmth from the hollow sockets above his ragged cheekbones.

He moved and made a curt little sign-language wave.

'Hello.'

Something seemed to occur to him just then. He did a double take and looked her up and down, like he couldn’t believe he saw her, as she was; shopping bags in hand and nervous-friendly smile at the ready.

More signing.

'You can see me?'

“I can,” (Y/N) nodded fervently, wondering how much she would be able to understand from her college-freshman sign language course. And wondering how long it would take the bus to get here. It was hardly ever on time, but it seemed especially late today. “Is that a bad thing?”

'No. No. It’s good. I’m glad.'

“Wonderful day, isn’t it?” She quipped, looking up at the grey, clouded sky, swollen with rain and wind.

He smiled. 'It used to be like this all the time where I am from.'

(Y/N) set her bags down and reclined on the bench, crossing one leg over the other. “And where might you be from, o Invisible One?”

Much like the sky, his gaze clouded over once more, and (Y/N) felt sorry for him, without really knowing why. Damn her empathy, she thought to herself - always getting her into trouble. But he really did seem sad.

'It doesn’t matter. It no longer exists.'

Before (Y/N) could comprehend exactly what the full context of that statement was, including the ever-present suspicion that she might be talking to a ghost, she asked, “Why?”

'It’s a long story.'

He looked out to the horizon, past the man with the unopened umbrella, past the woman on the corner, past the beat blue car. Then he looked back at her.

'Would you like to hear it?'

Without knowing why, she nodded yes, and he grabbed both of her hands without a single regard for the world around them - which was just as well, because they were no longer at the bus stop with the circle of life a-ticking, a-ticking, a-ticking. They were in a field, without a fence in sight; the only thing remaining being the great, grey, rumbling sky; droplets of water falling from the heavens like dew on new grass.

(Y/N) looked down at herself. “Oh my God.”

The grey man smiled and let go of her hands so he could sign. 'You look lovely.'

“I look like a medieval peasant, is what I look like.”

'Yes. A lovely peasant.'

It hit her, all at once. “Where am I? Where are we? How did we get here? How-” She faltered, noticing the shapes on the horizon; those of roaming horses, with strange peaks on top. “Are those knights?”

'When.'

“What?”

'When are we. It is the same place. A different ‘when’.'

(Y/N) felt faint. “Am I a medieval peasant?”

'Like I said, a lovely one.'

The knights on the horizon seemed to coalesce and then split apart like the frothing tide. The wind whipped up and the grey sky billowed out in puffs and swirls, completely obscuring any presence of a sun that might have been otherwise evident. (Y/N) felt a smattering of raindrops kiss her cheekbone as her hair flew out behind her. “This still doesn’t- who are you?”

The man was staring at the knights on the horizon with a peculiar expression, as if he were confused and trying desperately to recall some ancient memory. The realization came to him when he heard battle cries across the far field, and from some long distance behind them.

'No time.' He signed, and (Y/N) watched in awe and horror as the sea of knights in red and gold plunged down the hillside towards them, horses whinnying and screaming and blowing steam from their devilish nostrils. Behind them, a similar roar and thundering followed. She turned and saw the mirror image; a cavalry cascading towards them, draped in the colors white and black. Before she could think another solid thought - or wonder if she had fallen asleep and was dreaming - the grey man yanked her away and out of the crossfire.

They ran. She kept looking behind her at every distinguishable moment, and sometimes even indistinguishable ones - sometimes, she was running with the damp horizon line before her, sliding on mud and feeling her hand ache with the man’s tight grip; sometimes she was staring over her shoulder at the gruesome throng of soldiers killing one another. Blood seemed to spurt from every crevice of the scene, and she ran faster, terrified of the pangs she felt in her tightening chest, as if they might be some red-and-gold’s rapier wrecking her rib cage from inside out. When the man deemed them far enough away, and safe, he stopped, and the two leaned forward over their knees; heaving, sputtering, gasping with exhaustion.

“Who are you?!” She tried to scream, but it came out as a hoarse whisper, followed by a strained cough.

He signed letters. A name.

G-I-L-E-N B-E-I-L-S-C-H-M-I-D-T.

“Gilen Beilschmidt,” (Y/N) gasped softly now, still wincing at the cries from the battlefield, still rubbing her chest where her heart was hammering at its door. “Gilen Beilschmidt, why did you bring me here? How did you bring me here? What’s going on?”

The way he looked at her almost made her want to cry, but not out of the frustration she felt - moreso in the way one wants to cry when someone else is sad, when someone else is dying. She wanted to cry. For some godforsaken reason, she wanted to save him.

Gilen looked back toward the scene of the fight, watching the battle play out for a few moments, before reaching out once more for her hand. She jolted away at first, surprised when a few tears fell from her eyes.

“Don’t touch me,” she whispered. “Unless you’re going to bring me back home, don’t touch me. I don’t want to… I didn’t want…”

He gave her a longing look, red eyes open and sincere like the unfolding petals of a begonia bloom. 'Please. Just one more thing. You will go home soon. I promise.'

Without knowing why, she took a breath, looked up to the sky, and pressed her hand into his extended palm. Her vision twirled dizzily, and she closed her eyes to the sensation. Suddenly, she was moving! Her eyes flickered open and with a sinking horror, she realized she was on horseback, carrying a sword, wearing the black and white cross and emblem of the army who had been behind them in the rush.

She tried to scream once more, but though she had caught her breath from their flee from terror, she couldn’t seem to open her mouth now. Her hands - no longer were they hers. Pale, ghostly; they acted of their own accord, taking the sword from its sheath and unleashing its cold silver fury on the red-and-gold knights in front of her. It all happened so fast, she shouldn’t have been able to see - in fact, she could have closed her eyes to the horror of it all, watching her hands - not her hands - take life without reason, take life without cause. But the fact was, she could see, and that was what made her cry harder, screaming from inside this shell of a man in the Teutonic coat of arms who decided he had to have it all. Down, down, down they were cut, boys and men in red and gold of every age screaming every obscenity in a language her ears were both unfamiliar and familiar to, crying for their mothers, bleeding crimson fear, dying, cold and wet on the grasses of Mother Nature’s sordid scalp. She wanted to close her eyes to it all. She wanted to hear nothing but silence. Still, the red-and-gold knights kept coming. Still, her horse carried her onwards, cold silver sword now drowned in the beaded, slick blood of other men’s lives.

Then, there was a change in the air around them. Where the white and black Teutonic knights had been strong and confident in their killing (the only exception being her, (Y/N), screaming and hammering away inside the skull of this knight in particular), they were suddenly taken aback. A roar came from behind them, a sudden thundering of hoofbeats across the wet ground.

'The dead live,' she thought, without meaning to think it. Terror creased her brow as she wheeled her horse around, the black beauty whose name laid in this knight’s mind as Tödliche Nacht. Nacht whistled steam from his nostrils and whinnied in fright at the scene before them. If (Y/N) could have kicked him into a gallop and run away, she would have.

The red and gold knights they had cut down man-by-man were rising as one; some without working limbs, some without eyes, some without ears, and even one with a sword lodged in his side. 'The devils really do want to live,' the voice that shared her space in the skull thought incredulously. She screamed again to shut it up.

Before she could turn back to the horrible visage before her, though, a sudden pain in her chest woke her from her pain-enduring stupor. Shocked, she looked out of the black-and-white knight’s eyes to see, plain as day, a sword embedded in her chest; buried to the hilt. She looked up. The man who had killed her must have been in his early twenties, but he was still young. Not at all innocent, but young. She wondered at the look of bloodlust in his eyes as he yanked her cold, unresponsive body from the saddle and pulled the sword from her chest to kill Nacht as well.

When she fell upon the grass, she did not bounce. She landed with a thud, hard, and that seemed to jolt her out of whatever dream she was living in, whatever nightmare. She was back in her medieval peasant dress at the side of the battle, where the red-and-gold knights were cheering in victory, having killed the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. How she knew it, she did not know. She did not want to know. All she could think about was the look in the boy’s eyes. Inhuman, almost, the way he wanted her to die. But she felt so sad, so terribly sad, for that boy. Those eyes had once looked upon his mother with love. Those eyes had once looked upon his father with pride. What were they now?

She didn’t realize she had collapsed in the mud until she found herself all cold and wet on one side, writhing about under the sheets of cold rain that enveloped them. Though she was not at all injured, she kept pressing her hands to her chest as if to stem some invisible bleeding. She screamed and screamed until there was no more to scream, and even then, she kept her mouth open in choking, silent fear. And rage. And despair. He knelt next to her. He knelt next to her, and spoke not a word. He did not touch her. He did not speak. He did not sign.

His steady presence calmed her down enough so that she was able to form words, though they came out bloody and torn from her throat, for all the screaming she had done.

“Why?”

He looked at her, and she realized his eyes were really red now; in that he, too, had been crying.

'Because men often go to war over little things. They did not understand us. We did not understand them. It was inevitable.'

“It was not,” she sobbed weakly, curling on her side in the wet earth. “War is not inevitable. It's not.”

He stayed silent for a while, and then lifted his hands to sign again.

'It was then. Before enlightenment. Before equalized government. Before borders. Before modernity. Before any of the life you live now.'

“Before honesty and value and chivalry,” she mocked, still angry, still terrified. “Before love and kindness and goddammit, the ability to see each other as human!”

'No.' He shook his head. 'We had all of those things. We had chivalry. We had honesty. We had values and love and kindness.'

“Then where did they go? Where did you lock them up when you went to war? You didn’t keep them.”

Gilen considered the horizon and focused so intently on it that for a moment, (Y/N) looked out to it as well, wondering if she might see something. She didn’t. There was only grass and grey sky and mud for miles. The rabble of the knights behind them ceased to a mumble, and then to quiet as the skies opened up and rain began to really pour down. (Y/N) felt the cold rivulets running down her neck and sides and soaking into her linen dress, but she couldn’t think of it. She was stuck on the question. On everything they’d seen. Everything she’d seen.

'We kept them,' he answered finally. 'We just didn’t share them.'

(Y/N) stayed silent. She pulled herself into a sitting position, arms wrapped around her knees, resting her chin on them. She closed her eyes to the rain and let the cold draw her in, soothing her flesh from the wounds she had imagined so deeply in that soldier’s skull.

“I want to go home.”

He gave no further utterance, and gently touched her arm.

Gasping, (Y/N) flew upright on the bus stop bench and turned to see if Gilen was still there. He was. His red eyes looked more sad and ancient than ever, and it almost hurt to see him like that, but she had had enough trauma for one day, and she wasn’t going to shed any more tears over this man; this hypnotist, this magician. It was stupid. So incredibly stupid that she-

“What are you doing?” She asked.

He continued to undo the clasp on his white cloak, revealing the linen below with a big black cross in the center. With a delicateness that seemed so unfitting for a man who had committed atrocities on the battlefield, he folded his cloak neatly and set it aside on the bench. She stood, warily regarding him, and watched as he pulled apart a cut in the fabric she hadn’t noticed before.

Clutching a hand to her chest, she gave a little cry. The scar tissue on his chest matched the sword that she’d felt plunge into her skin on that rainy field in the middle of nowhere. A billion thoughts flashed through her mind, all of them taking their toll on her equally, so that she felt dizzy and couldn’t stand on her own. He reached forward and gently led her to sit once more on the grey bus stop bench, then picking up his cloak and wrapping himself up in it once more. (Y/N) looked at him, really looked at him, and took him in piece by piece, the soldier whose mind she had been inside - not soldier; the Grand Master, the leader of the Teutonic Order, the great Prussian Empire himself. He and his ruby-red eyes, his strong jaw, silent hands, pale skin, silver hair - each and every scar criss-crossing his face and jaw and neck that she just now seemed to notice; only how could she have missed them?

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

'I will explain everything.' He was calm as he signed it, and explain he did. About the world, about the wars. How it was that he could be alive. How it was that life was a constant cycle, a clock, always a-ticking, a-ticking, a-ticking, always restarting, always having beginnings and endings but never pausing to consider either too closely. He explained the countries and the continents, the history and the geography, he explained the swords and the horses and the way the knights clashed on that fateful day when his time on the clock came to an end, and was rewound.

“Why can’t you speak?” She asked when he was done. She had missed her bus two hours ago. The knowledge came to her suddenly, but she did not care.

'They took my voice away.' He looked down at his hands, almost ashamed. 'When an empire falls, they cannot speak anymore. I am merely a part of everyone who rules my land now. And yet somewhere there must still be a true Prussian order. Otherwise, I could not exist like this.'

“How can I see you, then?”

At this, he did look puzzled. 'I don’t know. You are the first. First ordinary person, that is.'

“Oh,” (Y/N) said. They sat for a moment, together, at the bus stop. She’d forgotten all about her bag. She’d forgotten all about getting home to her nice warm kitchen. The mug of tea she’d wanted to make. The chocolate cake she had been saving for the weekend. She’d forgotten about it all. She looked at Gilen, who was staring up at the sky, as if he were contemplating wounds which had been reopened. ‘He looks so sad,’ she thought to herself. ‘So sad.’

“Gilen.”

He looked at her outstretched hand, and the timid smile on her face.

“You said that you had chivalry, and honor, and kindness. You had them, but you just didn’t share them.”

'I did.' He was still confused.

She took a deep breath. “I’m sharing them now. Would you like to come home and have a slice of cake? It’s chocolate. I could make you some coffee, too. And you could tell me more stories.” She thought again. “Happier ones, that is.”

Never had she seen such compassion in a man’s face before. Tears bubbled up in his red, red eyes, ever-red, like a fire, like a sunrise. He took her hand with both of his and kissed it sweetly.

'I would love to.'

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, I hope you enjoyed, and if there was anything you noticed (errors in the format or grammar, things that are historically inaccurate, etc) please let me know!! Also let me know if you liked it, I thrive off of the comments I get on here, lol! Potentially a series to be continued... perhaps not with Gilen, but I do love him, so maybe I shall anyways :)  
> Oh! Also, happy (early) Pi Day! I'm excited to be in the kitchen tomorrow, trying out a blueberry pie. Which country do you think would most enjoy a blueberry pie? Maybe that'll be the premise for my next story... hmm...  
> Anyway, toodles for now! Remember that I love you and I hope you have a brilliant day! <3 <3 <3


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